Veres László: Üvegművességünk a XVI-XIX. században (Miskolc, 2006)
HUNGARIAN GLASSWARE PRODUCTION IN THE 16TH—19TH CENTURIES
task of collecting both Hungarian and foreign examples of glass art. From this time on the National Museum primarily specialised in collecting glass items of historical significance. By the time of World War I the Museum of Applied Arts had had a collection significant even by international standards. The exhibitions of the millennial celebrations together with the important innovations in glass making of the late 19 th century drew the public's attention to glass making techniques to an ever growing extent. Consequently, the outstanding surviving items of 18 ,h and 19* century Hungarian glass making were placed in the collections of the museums together with foreign glass masterpieces such as Venetian, Czech and German glass items. The glass material collected in this way was all "noble glass", meaning items representing the "glorious side" of our glass art. Archaeological excavations had found hardly any relics testifying to early Hungarian glass making, or else the glass fragments found at the archaeological sites were unknown to the experts. Glass made for everyday use, mainly in the small glass works in the forests, was a rarity on the shelves of the museums' collections. The general view held that these types of glass were of low artistic value made for satisfying the lower levels of society. There were only a few far-sighted collectors who recognised that within Hungarian glass art it was the so-called "peasant glass" that displayed the widest variety of ingenuity 7 and form, and did so uniquely with respect to the ones common in European glass making. "This is where our national character finds its most perfect articulation." The first collector of Hungarian peasant glass was Samuel Brukenthal, the founder of the museum in Szeben. He collected the products of glassworks operating in southern Transylvania, in the valley of the river Olt. Travelling all over the country György Déri also intentionally collected the most beautiful glass products from the peasants and small towns as well as from bourgeois households. Simon Telkes, one of the founders of the museum in Debrecen, gave an account of the results of his glass collecting activities on the inside cover of his monograph The HungarianGlass Industry, which was published in 1895. "This book is testimony to the long-extinct Hungarian forest glassworks and belongs to Colonel György Deri's folk glass collection of 125 items, which is in the Museum of Ethnography. Dated in Budapest on 15 th October, 1941. Signed by György Déri, colonel." The collector writes the following about the items at the bottom of the inside cover: "the 125 items can be divided into the following three groups: 1. Some 45 pieces from Bakonyerdő 2. Some 36 items from the Northern Hungarian hills as well as the Uplands 3. Some 44 pieces that came from the historical territory of greater Hungary, the lesser part of which w r ere made during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy but were mainly used in Hungarian lands." For a long time Samuel Brukenthal and György Déri had no followers at all. This was mainly due to the fact that art history entirely ignored peasant glass and folk glass. Art historians only considered fine glass and noble glass as the types that suited the genre as these were the ones that represented "higher artistic value". These products bear the signs of the changes in historical styles and the application of the various decorative glass handling techniques which require great technical skills. Research into folk art at the start of the twentieth century, when there were plenty of glass items around, sought the characteristically peasant autochton, or indigenous, genres. This view caused a great obstacle to the discovery of peasant glass. The distrust towards glass products used by peasants was increased by the fact that they might also have been used daily by cither a bourgeois or a noble family. Their doubtful origin was further due to the fact that glass making always required some industrial preliminary procedures and preparations as well as large-scale equipment and the organised labour of several people. It seemed justified to raise the question as to whether the nature of glass art makes it possible for it to become folk art. In view of this it is no wonder that Hungarian Ethnography only mentions one single glass item when describing the material environment of the Hungarian peasantry. The collection of peasant glass by museums only started in the 1950s. In Transylvania it was Károly S%pcs and Jenő Há%ár who collected a great number of glass products from the peasant and lesser noble households. In addition to the Brukenthal Museum in Nagyszeben [Sibiu] the large
